Friday 15 February 2013

Sri Lanka

We've just reached our half term break. I find that by half term, I'm tired and, I suspect, rather inarticulate. Apologies for several mistakes in yesterday's post. I had proof read but still didn't see them. Hopefully, they are now rectified and I hope that this post is free from similar errors.

Recently, some friends lent us a DVD about an orphanage in Sri Lanka. Having seen this, the children were keen to find out more about the country. I must say that this proved easier said than done!

First, we looked for children's books.
How to make apple pie and see the world talks about Sri Lanka as the source of cinnamon and shows its location on a map.
The other book that we used was very old but did have a clear description about the tea growing process, even if it talked about Ceylon and I had to do rapid conversions from Imperial to SI units!


The younger children coloured flags-the components of the flag represent the Singalese, Tamil and Moor populations.

Youngest Daughter coloured her first map and we made the discovery that the capital is not Colombo but Sri Jayawardenapura-Kotte named by a president, after himself.

Middle Son and I worked on Asian countries and then Asian capitals on Seterra. The capitals took a fair amount of work!

Middle Son was set to research the challenges facing the country using information from the World Bank and Wikipedia.

We all looked at photographs of this beautiful country; both from this source and from this travel site.

Youngest daughter painted elephants.


Traditional food often involves fish and coconut so we made a curry. 

The recipe I followed was rather sparing with chili so this was surprisingly mild and of course, there is tea-still known as Ceylon tea.

Please do let me know if you know of any more Sri Lanka resources as I found that there was a relative paucity of child orientated information.

This is linked to the history and geography meme and Living Life Intentionally.



5 comments:

  1. I can't help with any resources for Sri Lanka but I have to tell you how impressed I am that you were able to 'do rapid conversions from Imperial to SI units' when you're struggling with tiredness and inarticulateness (is there such a word?) I'm not sure I could convert in my head, much less rapidly, at ANY time, let alone when I wasn't at my best!
    I love your daughter's elephant!

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  2. Great country study!!!

    You could always add the generic country lapbooks or notebooking to help thicken it up a bit if you want. Homeschool Share has them.

    I found you through the blog hop at Living Life Intentionally! :)

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    1. Thank you-that is a useful idea. I will take a look.

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  3. This is a wonderful study on a place that is not often studied. I agree with Angelicscaliwags...I could never do the calculations, but less fast! Thank you so much for linking up!

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